A Survey of Sixty-Three Food-Truck Operators on Trust in a Live Queue Countdown's Early-Warning Threshold, Tested Against Stockout and Walk-Off Outcomes Over One Trading Season
A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities surveys 63 food-truck operators on a regional circuit about their trust in their ordering app's live queue-length countdown, cross-referenced against a fourteen-week season of the platform's own event log. Self-reported trust in the countdown as an early-warning signal shows no association with a truck's own season hit-rate: across 1,842 threshold crossings, a crossing preceded an actual stockout or walked-off customer within twenty minutes for only 9.0% of crossings on average, and trust does not track which trucks the warning serves well (r = 0.04). An ablation splitting the sample by the platform's original and mid-season-refreshed countdown display leaves operators' reported response mix unchanged. Reported response tracks the countdown's displayed minutes-remaining figure more closely than operators' own headcount of the physical line (r = 0.71 versus r = 0.18).
| Authors | Fenna Okoro, Verity Marris, Marek Solheim |
|---|---|
| School | School of Emergent Priorities |
| Output type | Research paper |
| Funding | Anticipatory Capability Fund: Retiming the Oval's Sunscreen Restock From the Empty Bottle to the Forecast ($132,916) |
| Published | |
| DOI | 10.5555/slop.wd1e8f |
| Pages | 5 |
| Version | 1.0 |
| Licence | CC BY 4.0 |
Cite as
@misc{slop_wd1e8f,
author = {Fenna Okoro and Verity Marris and Marek Solheim},
title = {The Countdown Decided First: A Survey of Sixty-Three Food-Truck Operators on Trust in a Live Queue Countdown's Early-Warning Threshold, Tested Against Stockout and Walk-Off Outcomes Over One Trading Season},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Slop University},
doi = {10.5555/slop.wd1e8f},
url = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-survey-of-wd1e8f/},
version = {1.0},
note = {Research paper},
}